Amazing Stories page 2

A 14 year trip.

After 14 years and an ocean trek measuring a quarter of Earth's waistline, a message in a bottle has popped up in the dunes along the beaches of Southwestern Australia's Big Quaram Beach. On Feb. 19, 1997, retired Texas Tech professor George Tereshkovich, aboard the Holland-America's grand ocean liner SS Rotterdam, wrote out his missive, addressing it to an anonymous recipient who might find it and promising him or her $5. As the sun set, Tereshkovich, a plant and soil scientist, tossed the sealed bottle, which also included his business card, into the ocean. "I told the wife what I was going to do," the 81-year-old said in a statement. "She thought I was seasick or something, throwing a note overboard. We continued cruising, and I completely forgot about it." That is until late April 2011, when a couple on a hiking trip spotted the bottle, 6,000 miles (9,656 kilometers) from its origin.At the time he wrote the note, Tereshkovich and his wife were on a cruise ship that had left from San Diego, Calif., to go around the world and disembark in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., 102 days later. Right after crossing the equator, the idea for the message hit him. "I remember I wrote February 1997, and I told them I was on a world cruise with my wife," he said. "I said 'to the finder of this note, I will award them $5 if they send me the message back.' But I wondered, 'What address do I give to return my letter?' Well, I knew that Texas Tech University was always going to be here, so I used a Texas Tech address, put my business card in there and I threw it overboard." Diane Chanut spotted the bottle while vacationing at Big Quaram Beach with her partner, Luke McLaren. "I caught sight of the bottle on a dune a bit out from the tide line, and Luke volunteered to go check it out," Chanut said in a statement. "What was our surprise when, upon inspection, the said bottle did include some form of paper in it. We opened up the bottle to get the piece of paper out. It was very faded by the sun, but we managed to read it and also found the attached business card, which was in very good condition." To celebrate the find, the couple took a photo of the message. They were also hoping to get in touch with the sender. The letter apparently read: "February 19, 1997, I am aboard the SS Rotterdam (Holland-America line) en route to Perth, Australia in the Great Australian Bight Sea. Should you find this note [undecipherable words] date and place you found the message. Dr George Tereshkovich, Department of Plant & Soil Science, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas [undecipherable numbers] USA"The condition of the bottle and letter suggested this wasn't a scam, convincing the couple to follow up on the discovery. "I obviously wasn't sure if we were going to get an answer or not, but I figured that if the person who dropped the bottle went through this exercise, they would probably be glad to get an answer and thus would probably get back to us," Chanut said. "Also, the university address was a good place to make sure we would be able to track down the whereabouts of the sender in case he was no longer working there, so that was also upping our chances of hearing back from the mysterious sender." After having little luck finding contact information by Googling Tereshkovich's name, Chanut emailed the dean's office at the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources to ask how to get in touch with the retired professor. Since the time he wrote the letter, Tereshkovich had moved to Austin, Texas, and never got into using email. A secretary there said that she would pass her note along to Tereshkovich. A few days later, Tereshkovich found a letter from Texas Tech in his mailbox. "I thought, 'Here's the dean asking for more money,'" he said, joking. "I opened it up. When I read it, I was stunned someone found my bottle with the message." Tereshkovich responded in kind with a letter. "We were completely blown away when we received Dr. T's letter a few days after that," Chanut said. “It was so heartfelt and so generous to us. He included some souvenirs from the U.S., such as postcards from his home in Lubbock, a couple of $2 notes and the 'reward' he remembered promising in his letter ($5 plus inflation from 1997), so we could treat ourselves to a nice bottle of Barossa Valley wine next time we were in town." Chanut added, "We could read the excitement in his words, and it was such a great story to tell around us as well." Over the next two or three years, Tereshkovich said he plans to save up for a cruise to Australia and take an excursion to Alice Springs to meet the couple.

Found on Miami Beach.

A group of tourists made a surprising find on a South Florida beach. Four tourists from Pittsburgh came to Miami for the holiday weekend when a message in a bottle turned up in the water floating off Miami Beach. "We were out in the ocean just swimming around, noticed a real faint glistening green bottle in the distance. I pointed to it, and he was the one that suggested we go out there and get it," said Victor Vicario.Brian Welsh was with the group when they spotted the bottle. "I pulled the letter out, bunch of information from a gentleman in Scotland doing some sort of exhibit, some kind of story, and 'He threw the bottle into the water nine months ago,'" said Welsh.It turns out, this is not the first overseas message Ryan has launched. He said he has launched many bottles over the last 15 years, but this is the first one to make it all the way to Miami. "This bottle was launched on a boat I was helping deliver, a sailing boat from France over to Antigua. " said Ryan.Amy Vicario, whose husband found the bottle, said it is something they will never forget. "It was really neat to see something from another country while we're here on vacation, something we can show our kids when we get home. They'll probably think it's the neatest thing ever," said Vicario.Ryan said his bottles have turned up on beaches in the United Kingdom, Spain, the Caribbean and along the United States east coast.

A sad story

In February 1916 the doomed crew of Zeppelin L 19 dropped their last messages to their superiors and loved ones into the North Sea. These washed up on the Kattegat coast near Gothenburg, Sweden six months later.

An Irish mystery solved.

A letter in a pop bottle that spent eight years drifting across the Atlantic has thrust three strangers into an unlikely spotlight on both sides of the pond.Two 12-year-old friends tossed the message, handwritten in French and jammed into a pop bottle, into the ocean while on vacation in Grande Vallée, Que., in June 2004.This week, a nine-year-old boy in Passage East, a small town on the south coast of Ireland, found the wayward message while he was out exploring the aftermath of flooding in his village with some friends."I thought it was just rubbish. So I picked it up, looked in the bottle and then I opened it," Oisin Millea told CBC Montreal.At first, understanding the message was a bit of a challenge for him. "I tried to read it and I thought it was in Spanish, and then I found out it was in French."After finding out that neither of his parents could speak French, Millea eventually turned to his grandfather for help."I showed it to my granddad and he told me a little bit of what it said."In the end, Oisin was able to decode the message using Google translator.Girls, now 20, act on newspaper coverageThe message said the girls were from Montreal and were on vacation in the Gaspé region. They got the idea from a TV show.They included their first names and an email address along with a plea to contact them if the bottle were ever found.Oisin and his family tried to do just that, but the email address was no longer active. They took their mysterious letter to a local newspaper and the story spread from there. Armed with only the first names of the senders, the Milleas weren't sure they'd be able to locate the girls.But on Tuesday, the women, now 20, saw the coverage of the story in a Montreal newspaper and set up a meeting with Oisin over Skype.Tourism Ireland took note of the story and offered the women a free weeklong trip to the Emerald Isle. A spokesperson from the tourist bureau said the women will travel to the small town to meet the recipient of their message and retrieve their bottle next year.Oisin said he was surprised that the bottle was able to travel so far. And he's amazed that it made it to his village."I'd read it in a lot of stories before," he said. "Sometimes we just go down looking for them, but we never find them."Now he has plans to toss his own message into the deep, and then wait to see where it lands.

Girl meets boy.

"My name is Tate Van Liew. My daddy put this note to sea in a bottle at the equator when he was sailing from France to South Africa.That is how the message read. A letter penned by Brad Van Liew, instructed by his daughter, and dropped into the ocean right off the coast of Brazil, on the equator.A video of Brad while sailing shows him throwing the bottle overboard as he sails past the invisible line. "At the equator, boom. Tate's message in a bottle is gone. Perfectly at the equator within one thousandth of a mile."The bottle then drifted north from the equator all the way to the small island of St Maarten. That is where it washed ashore...9 months and 2,250 miles later.The bottle was discovered by a 7 year old Polish boy and his parents, vacationing from Warsaw. The boy, Michael, and his father, were strolling the beach looking for "pirate treasure."The bottle may not be treasure, and Brad no pirate, but the adventure in this story is priceless."I've never heard of anyone getting one recovered, so it is really pretty neat," says Brad.

A mother's tribute.

A mother's tribute to Private James Prosser, who was killed in 2009, has been found by oil-spill workersA message in a bottle written by the mother of a British soldier killed in Afghanistan has been found by workers cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.Sarah Adams, 43, was on holiday in Barbados when she wrote the loving message about her son Private James Prosser, 21, who was killed by a roadside bomb.She threw it into the sea and after floating 1,300 miles it was fished out of the water by workers cleaning up the oil leak from the BP pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico.The workers were so moved by Mrs Adams' message they wrote to her to pay their own tribute to her son.Mrs Adams said: 'I put the message in a bottle of Sambuca - because that was James's favorite drink. 'The message was all about James, how much we loved him and how much we miss him. 'I wanted to make everyone aware that we're responsible for the world we live in and not to forget the soldiers who have given up their lives. 'It was an open letter to anyone who found it - but I never thought it would be seen again. 'I'm so delighted it has been found by such caring people and that James has touched their lives as well.'Mrs Adams tossed the bottle from a boat in the Caribbean on January 5 - and it turned up at Horn Island off the coast of Louisana.In their letter to Mrs Adams, the workers said: 'Words cannot express our heartfelt sympathy to your family over the loss of James.Your letters describe a remarkable young man who was very loved by his family and friends.'We extend our gratitude to James for the service he did in Afghanistan and we recognise the courage, the strength and bravery it requires to serve in the Armed Forces.'You are in our thoughts as we all continue to pray for the safe return of our soldiers worldwide.'As we are certain he did before his death, James has continued to touch the lives of many people in a positive way.'Finding that bottle is something we will never forget.'The workers from Progressive Pipeline Management also sent Mrs Adams a signed T-shirt from the crew and a photograph of them with the bottle.James of the 2nd battalion Royal Welsh was was killed while driving his Warrior vehicle during a patrol in Helmand Province in September last year.His family went to Barbados on holiday because they could not face a traditional Christmas at home without James.

Nine miles per day.

Barry Sadler and his wife were on passage between St Maarten and the Azores in April 2010, but because of poor weather they decided to go direct to Lisbon. Some 90 miles south-west of Lisbon they threw overboard a bottle with a message inside.

Amazingly, the bottle and contents were found on a beach in Texas in March by oceanographer Tony Amos, who emailed this fascinating observation to Barry:

‘I found your message in a bottle on San Jose Island Gulf beach, Texas, USA, on Wednesday 14 March, 2012. I am an oceanographer at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, Texas and in the course of surveying local beaches for decades I have found several messages in bottles. Yours has probably traveled farther than any of the others.

‘I am working out a probable route it took to go from near Lisbon to Port Aransas that will involve the North Atlantic Gyre, the Anegada Passage, Caribbean, Yucatan Strait and the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico. It traveled at least 6,500 miles and took nearly two years to do so.'

The right fisherman.

In 1999, Steve Gowan spotted something clinging to his fishing nets. It was a very old bottle containing two letters written by Pvt. Thomas Hughes, dated September 9, 1914. The first message asked the person that found the bottle to forward the second message to Hughes' wife, Elizabeth. The note for Elizabeth was a nice, simple love letter, showing that his wife was in his thoughts as he made his way to France to fight in the early days of World War I.

After reading the letters, Gowan felt a great personal responsibility to see that they found their way home, even though he assumed Mrs. Hughes had died long ago. He began searching for her descendants and soon learned that Thomas and Elizabeth Hughes' daughter was still alive in Auckland, New Zealand.

Sadly, Hughes died in battle shortly after he wrote the letters, so he never got to see Elizabeth, nor his 2-year old daughter, Emily, ever again. Due to her young age at the time of his death, Emily never knew her father, though she grew up listening to stories about him from her mother and cherishing his posthumously award medals. So when The New Zealand Post offered to send Gowan to Auckland to hand-deliver the bottle to Emily, he jumped at the chance to help her connect to this lost piece of her past.

For Emily, the bottle was a great source of joy and comfort. She said her father's message couldn't come home "until the right boat came along at the right time with the right fisherman."

A new life.

During a 1979 cruise to Hawaii, Dorothy and John Peckham passed the time by writing notes and throwing them overboard inside empty champagne bottles. They asked anyone who found one of their bottles to write them back, and even went so far as to include a $1 bill to cover the postage.

On March 4, 1983, John's 70th birthday, the couple received a letter from Hoa Van Nguyen. Nguyen, a former soldier in the Vietnamese Army, said he and his younger brother had found one of the Peckhams' bottles as the two men were floating 15 kilometers from the shore of Songkhla Province in Thailand. They were braving the waters of the Pacific in a small, shallow riverboat in order to escape the Communist regime in Vietnam. When they saw the bottle, they felt as though a prayer had been answered, giving them the strength to carry on. After reading the letter, the Peckhams looked for Songkhla on a map and were shocked to find that the bottle had traveled 9,000 miles from Hawaii.

The Peckhams corresponded with Hoa for years, sharing in his joy when they received a photo from his wedding, then again nine months later when they saw his newborn son. But most of all, they empathized with Hoa's desire to give his family the best life he could. So when Hoa asked if the Peckhams could help his family move to the U.S., they didn't hesitate. After months of working with U.S. Immigration, the two families finally did meet in 1985, when a plane from Thailand landed in Los Angeles -- the Nguyens' new home.

A love note.

Voyages at sea can get a little dull, as an 18-year-old Swedish sailor named Ake Viking discovered in 1955. Because life at sea can also get a little lonely, he penned a letter that began, “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away.” He wrote about himself, and suggested that the finder should write him back. He sealed it in a bottle and dropped it overboard. After two years, Viking found a letter waiting for him with the postmark of Syracuse, Sicily, Italy. He got a shipmate to translate, and that’s when Ake learned it was from a 17-year-old named Paolina. Her letter said:“Last Tuesday, I found a bottle on the shore. Inside was a piece of paper, bearing writing in a strange language. I took it to our priest, who is a great scholar. He said the language was Swedish and, with the help of a dictionary, he read me your charming letter. I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have traveled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer…”They continued to exchange letters, and Viking eventually traveled to Sicily. A short time later, the pair that came together through the most miraculous of circumstances was wed.

Always there.

When Josh Baker was 10 years old, he dumped an entire bottle of his mother's vanilla extract down the sink. He then wrote a quick note that said, "My name is Josh Baker. I'm 10. If you find this, put it on the news. The date is April 16, 1995." He stuffed the note inside the empty extract bottle and threw it into Wisconsin's White Lake.

Life went on and, after high school, Josh signed up for the Marines. During his tour of duty in Iraq, he survived the dangers of fighting door-to-door in Fallujah and made it back home to the U.S. safe and sound. Tragically, shortly after his homecoming, Josh was killed in a car accident, leaving his family and friends devastated and asking the obvious question, "Why?" A few months later, Steve Lieder and Robert Duncan, friends of Josh's, were walking on the banks of White Lake, when they saw something glimmer on the water. After fishing it out, they realized it was a vanilla extract bottle with a piece of paper inside.

To friends and family, the message from 10-year-old Josh appeared when they needed it most. It felt as though he was reaching out, letting them know that he was watching, and trying to help them move on. This message of hope is currently displayed in the Bakers' home as a constant reminder that their son is still with them, even though he's gone.